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The solicitor for the Wyoming County Recorder of Deeds Office, defending its refusal to provide electronic records of natural-gas leases to The Citizens' Voice, recently vowed to fight "tooth and nail" to "protect" the office's records.

That raises the question: Protect them from whom?

The primary job of the Recorder of Deeds is to gather, store and protect property records for use by the public and by extension, the media.

But Recorder of Deeds Dennis Montross and his minions have thrown up roadblock after roadblock in response to our efforts for access to computerized records.

The Citizens' Voice requested the records under the state Open Records Law in June in order to add information on more than 4,000 gas leases in Wyoming County to our online database at citizensvoice.com.

Montross' office refused to provide the information on a disk or through a data storage device known as a flash drive, even though the records law clearly states that if information exists in an electronic form, a government office must provide it in that form.

We have subsequently learned that the office routinely supplies such information in electronic form to banks who pay $15 for each month's data.

In order to get readers information on the spread of gas leases in the county as quickly as possible, we accepted, and paid for, the records on paper and entered the information into the database by hand. The paper documents omitted some key information, most notably the number of acres covered by each lease.

We have appealed Montross' blatant violation of the Open Records Law to the state Office of Open Records, not only because of the missing data, but because of the principle involved.

Newspapers and their websites are often the only way the public can readily access such information. The taxpayers of Wyoming County and the state at large should have the same rights to gas-lease information as banks and other private users.

We could not let Montross set a precedent by denying us and our readers reasonable access to unquestionably public documents as defined by law.

And we'll fight tooth and nail to protect that access.

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